Monday, 24 April 2017

Joshua W. Seachris on Cosmic Futility and the importance of narrative endings

Does
it matter how the universe ends? Should we be worried by the naturalistic,
scientifically grounded expectation that in a few billion years our solar
system comes to an end and all traces that will then still be left of our
existence (if there are any) will disappear forever? Should it affect the way
we look at our life now? Does it make
what we do now any less meaningful? Our
intuitions are divided on this one: on the one hand it seems preposterous to
believe that something that is going to happen so far in the future can have
any bearing on the meaning of our present lives. Why should it? We will, after
all, long be gone by then. On the other, to think that whatever we do, whatever
we achieve, whatever we change, whatever good we may bring about, in the long
run none of it will have made any difference, may well make us wonder why we
bother doing it in the first place. It seems pointless. Futile. And we don’t
want our actions to be futile. Ideally, we want them to make a lasting impact. Otherwise,
what is the point of living?

In
his 2011 paper “Death, Futility, and the Proleptic Power of Narrative Ending”[1],
Joshua W. Seachris calls this second intuition the staying-power intuition
(SPI), which he defines as “the idea that, ceteris paribus, worthwhile,
significant and meaningful things last.”
(461)[2]
Actions that have no lasting consequences are futile. Deep or cosmic futility
is the futility that results from the presumed fact that, because of the way
the world works, there is ultimately nothing
that has any lasting consequences. But why do we have this intuition in the
first place: that only what lasts is meaningful? Seachris argues that the
naturalistic assumption that we are making when we consider the meaning of our
lives threatened or undermined by the way we think the world is going to end
can and should be understood as a narrative
or “meta-narrative”. In narratives, it always matters how they end. When we
assess a story – emotionally, morally, aesthetically – the ending is
particularly relevant. It not only matters to us what happens at the end, but also that it happens at the end. A bad ending is bad, just as a bad
beginning is bad, but a bad ending is much worse than a bad beginning,
precisely because it is a bad ending.
It is the “narrative ending qua
ending”, which “is salient in our broadly normative assessments of narratives
as a whole”. (462) A lot of sad things can happen in the course of a narrative,
but they don’t necessarily make the story as a whole a sad one. Yet a sad ending
always makes for a sad story, and a happy ending for a happy story. “The ending
relevantly frames the entire story.” (464) Cosmic futility is a threat because
we look at life as a whole from a narrative perspective. If we didn’t – if we didn’t
care so much about how things end -, we would not feel that our lives can be
rendered worthless by what happens or does not happen in the far future of the
world, seemingly nullifying all the good things that are actually happening in
the present, all our accomplishments and achievements.

Of
course whatever happens in the future, none of it can affect what has already happened.
What we have accomplished, we have accomplished. If we have changed the world
for the better, we have changed it for the better, at least for a while. Nothing
is going to change that. Happy moments will still be happy moments even they
don’t last, and they will forever remain happy moments. The past is what it is.
It cannot be changed by the future. However, what we know or believe about the
future can change how we understand
and evaluate what is happening in the
present. If you knew that your marriage was going to end in an acrimonious
divorce, then whatever joy you might still experience would most likely be
tainted and devaluated by your knowledge of the impending bad ending. Similarly,
if we know or believe that humanity will one day disappear from the world
without leaving a trace, then that is likely to make a difference to us now. Because
endings matter. If they did not, cosmic futility would not be an issue. This is
why the theist has an advantage over the naturalist. A theistic meta-narrative
promises a happy ending. It promises an ending that gives lasting significance
to our lives, and that promise may make a considerable difference to how we
view our lives now.

The
fact that for the theist life never really ends
at all (because the theistic meta-narrative promises immortality), poses no
serious obstacle to a narrative assessment. A narrative ending need not be a termination. It can also be closure. Ending as closure does not
require that everything come to an
end, but only that “a conflict or a series of conflicts that have arisen over
the course of the narrative” (468) be resolved. The ending is contextual rather
than absolute. The living-happily-ever-after formula stands for such an ending,
which is all that is needed for the narrative appraisal of a life. This is
because the life that we are worried about is this life, “with all its pain, suffering, and hardship” (468),
which would be concluded and happily resolved in an after-life of eternal
bliss.

COMMENTARY:

A
few thoughts, the first relating to the nature of futility: it seems to me that
for our actions to be futile it is not sufficient that they have no lasting
consequences. It all depends on whether we want
them to be lasting and how lasting we
want them to be. Generally speaking, futile is an action whose intended goal is not accomplished. Accordingly,
we cannot judge whether an action is futile or not if we don’t know what goal
it was intended to accomplish. If what I intend to accomplish by doing
something is completely unrelated to the eventual fate of the universe, then
what I am doing is not rendered futile by said fate. If I study hard to become
a decent philosopher, then my labours have not been futile if I manage to
become a decent philosopher as a result, not even if the whole solar system
will perish in a few billion years, because that has got nothing to do with it.
Seachris seems to agree with this understanding, suggesting that in order for
an action to be futile, one must aim at some desired end that then proves
impossible to attain (471). It follows that “in the case of the futility that
is sometimes thought to characterize life in a naturalistic universe, the
futility is largely a function of the discrepancy between our deepest desires
and the nature of the naturalistic world which seems to ultimately prevent
theses desires from being realized.” (472) However, this seems to presuppose
that we do have a deep desire that what we do now will have an impact far
beyond our own life span and even beyond the life span of our solar system. Is
that really so? I may have some desire to be remembered after my death, mostly
by my loved ones, and perhaps by others, for a while at least. But do I have a
deep desire to still have an impact on things a few billion years from now? I cannot detect this desire in me, and
it would seem a very odd desire to have.

Even
if my desires are more far-reaching, more world-changing in their ambition, I
doubt that we would seriously expect or even hope to make an everlasting impact.
Let us say that I can make the world a better place in some way, and I also
desire to do so, but that at the same time I am aware that it is not going to
last. The world will only be better for a while. Would my plan, in that case,
not be worth pursuing at all? Or would I at least feel that it would not be worth pursuing? No doubt, it would
certainly be better if the world remained
a better place, and the longer it remained a better place the better it would be,
but from that it doesn’t follow that being a better place only for a while is
not better than never to have been a better place at all. I don’t see why the
impossibility to make any state of affairs last should make it pointless to help
this state of affairs come about.

Still,
we do want things to last, or more
precisely we want the good things to
last, as long as it is possible for them to last without ceasing to be good. And
yes, endings do matter to us. Seachris connects our desire for good things to
last with our preference for good endings over bad endings and our preference
for good endings over good beginnings (or middles), and sees the former founded
in the latter. I am wondering, however, granted that there is indeed a
connection between these two intuitions, can we really be sure which comes
first? Do we want things to last because endings matter (as Seachris suggests),
or do endings matter to us because we want things (or at any rate the good things) to last? Consider: if an
ending is good, then the good is going to last because it is that with which
everything has ended. If it is indeed an ending, then we don’t have to fear
that things will turn bad again. If, on the other hand, the ending is bad, then
the good has not lasted and there is no chance that things will change: there
is no hope that the good is ever going to come back because the story has
ended. As long as the story has not ended, there is always a chance for things
to change. So if we want the good things to last, then it is easy to see why
endings often matter so much to us.

Normally,
however, endings matter to us only to the extent that they are an integral part
of particular desires. To convince us that endings matter, Seachris uses the example
of a romantic relationship. Clearly if I knew now that my relationship was
going to end badly it would change the way I feel about it. It would lose part
of its meaning and would appear pretty pointless, but only if I expected and
wanted it to last. That is normally the case when we fall in love with someone.
If I love I cannot help feeling or at least hoping that my love will last. If
it does not, then my love wasn’t really what I thought it was. If my marriage
ends in divorce my marriage has failed because it in my mind was meant to last, not forever, but perhaps “until
death do us part”. There are hopes and expectations connected to being involved
in a romantic relationship with someone, especially if it ends in marriage,
which is yet another beginning: a beginning of something that can, once again,
end well or badly. The end of a love affair, and perhaps even more so the
dissolution of a marriage is a sad ending to an (for those involved) exciting
story, but the eventual disappearance of all life from the face of the Earth is
not really a sad or bad end at all, certainly not for us, if only because we
never expected, nor had any reason to expect, that it would last forever.

[1] First published in Religious Studies 47 (2011): 141-163.
Reprinted in: Exploring the Meaning of
Life. An Anthology and Guide, Chichester: John Wiley 2013, 461-480.

[2] Seachris points out that there
is also a second rival intuition, the “scarcity intuition”, according to which what
we do is meaningful precisely because things will not last.